| The engineering profession is concerned about the relatively low number of students graduating with engineering degrees from American colleges and universities. A large fraction of students who start college as engineering students do not persist. Contributing to the problem is the fact that engineering has traditionally been considered a white male profession, and this is reflected in today's graduates even as national demographics change.; The purpose of this study is to gain an understanding of the phenomenon of student persistence in undergraduate engineering programs and to discover what the first year persistence rates are for engineering students at the University of South Carolina. A model to predict student persistence using variables gathered before freshman enrollment from various student information data sources was constructed. Data for students who entered engineering in 1992–1999 was used to build the prediction model, while data for students who began in 2000 was used to cross-validate the model.; Variables that contribute to the prediction model are gender, SAT scores, scores on a math placement test, high school GPA, high school AP Calculus, whether a student earned college credit while in high school, if the student visited the College before orientation, and student responses to specific questions in an orientation survey. |
